Macedonia as a whole tended to remain in isolation from the rest of Greece...

Alexander the Great, page 20.

...for the first time he [Philip] began to understand how Macedonia's outdated institutions of feudalism and aristocratic monarchy, so despised by the rest of Greece, might prove a source of strength when dealing with such opponents.

Alexander the Great, page 24.

In less than four years he had transformed Macedonia from a backward and primitive kingdom to one of the most powerful states in the Greek world.

Alexander of Macedon, 356-323 B.C.: A Historical Biography, page 32.

Aristotle found support for his thesis in facts drawn from geopolitics or ‘natural law’. Greek superiority had to be proved demonstrably innate, a gift of nature. In one celebrated fragment he counsels Alexander to be ‘a hegemon [leader] of Greeks and a despot to the barbarians, to look after the former as after friends and relatives, and to deal with the latter as with beasts or plants’.